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Purification, crystallization and preliminary X-ray analysis of urease from pigeon pea (Cajanus cajan)
Anuradha Balasubramanian1, Karthe Ponnuraj
1Centre of Advanced Study in Crystallography and Biophysics, University of Madras, Guindy Campus, Chennai 600 025, India.
Abstract:
Urease is a seed protein that is common to most Leguminosae. It also occurs in many bacteria, fungi and several species of yeast. Urease catalyzes the hydrolysis of urea to ammonia and carbon dioxide, thus allowing organisms to use exogenous and internally generated urea as a nitrogen source. Urease from pigeon pea seeds has been purified to electrophoretic homogeneity using a series of steps involving ammonium sulfate fractionation, acid precipitation, ion-exchange and size-exclusion chromatography techniques. The pigeon pea urease was crystallized and the resulting crystals diffracted to 2.5 A resolution. The crystals belong to the rhombohedral space group R32, with unit-cell parameters a = b = 176.29, c = 346.44 A.
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